Lilypond Scores

I’m no composer, and not much of a musician, but sometimes it’s nice to visualize music, or save an idea expressed as notes. The program Lilypond is available in Linux and allows users to enter musical score in a text file, and produce nice looking PDF files and accompanying MIDI. For a friend, I created a simple test file to demonstrate the input format. The Lilypond web site has a much more comprehensive set of documentation.

Here is a link to the Lilypond source file I created, based on my memory of the original tune.

Download earthangel_test.txt

I ran Lilypond from a terminal in order to generate a PDF and MIDI file from the source file like so:

lilypond earthangel_test.txt

Using the software MIDI synthesizer timidity, I created a sound file from the resulting MIDI file like so:

timidity -Ov earthangel_test.midi

Here is a link to the sound file in Ogg/Vorbis format, rendered using timidity.

Download earthangel_test.ogg (119K)

And finally, here is a link to the score rendered as a PDF (with a screenshot included below).

Download earthangel_test.pdf